Ronald Marquez is an Assistant Professor at the Dept. of Chemical Engineering at the University of Girona, Spain. Previously Research Manager at the SAFI Consortium at the Department of Forest Biomaterials, North Carolina State University. He completed a Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Laboratoire Physico-Chimie des Interfaces Complexes ESPCI Paris and TotalEnergies, under the supervision of Dr. Valérie Molinier, focusing on bio-oil/heavy oil interfaces for marine transportation fuels (2021-2023). He also held a Postdoctoral Fellowship at NC State University, working on transforming textile wastes into biobased building blocks (2020-2021).
Dr. Marquez earned his Ph.D. in Applied Sciences from the University of the Andes, Venezuela, under the supervision of Dr. Jean-Louis Salager, and Dr. Dominique Langevin as advisor, where he focused on the interfacial rheological properties of surfactant-oil-water systems (2015-2019). He also holds a Chemical Engineering degree from the University of the Andes, Venezuela (2006).
His research interests span surfaces and interfaces of lignocellulosic materials and polysaccharides, emulsions, biofuels, interfacial and bulk rheology, formulation, biobased materials, surfactants, and pulp & paper. Dr. Marquez has authored and co-authored numerous scientific journal papers and conference proceedings. He serves as an Associate Editor of the Journal of Surfactants and Detergents since 2020. He is a member of several professional and scientific societies, including the American Oil Chemists' Society (AOCS), the Technical Association of Pulp and Paper Industry (TAPPI), the Society of Petroleum Engineers (SPE), and the American Chemical Society (ACS), where he is part of the Industry & Communication Committee.
Dr. Marquez has been recognized with several awards, including the ENFL American Chemical Society Young Investigator Spotlight Award (2023) and the AOCS Surfactants and Detergents Division's American Cleaning Institute Distinguished Paper Award (2023, 2019). He has also received the Medal of Academic Merit by the Association of Professors of the University of Los Andes (2019) and the Dr. "Mariano Picón Salas" Teaching Excellence Program distinction (2016-2020).
Areas of Research:
AI-enabled circular materials science as an emerging interdisciplinary field leveraging machine intelligence to predict, optimize, and sustainably manage material structures and functions across scales and applications, including four pillars (Link):
Pillar I: Physical Chemistry of Interfaces
- Interfacial tension.
- Oscillatory dilational rheology.
Pillar II: Advanced Emulsion Systems
- Hydrophilic Lipophilic Deviation to predict emulsion properties according to surfactant or oil.
- Prediction of the lifetime of emulsions and phase behavior modeling through formulation vs. composition maps.
Pillar III: Lignocellulosic & Supramolecular Materials as Circular Platforms, and Energy Sustainability
- Cellulose, nanocellulose, and amphiphilic lignin derivatives.
- Hierarchical structuring.
- Energy reduction in the pulp & paper industry, and carbon capture.
Pillar IV: AI & LLMs as Accelerators of Materials Discovery and Education
- Predictive modeling of fiber-based bioproducts.
- Large language models (LLMs) and AI for literature mining, coding, and augmented intelligence.
Educational Modules:
- A short course on Hydrophilic-Lipophilic Deviation (HLD/HLDN):
https://marquezrn03.github.io/A-Short-Course-on-HLD/
- A short course on Interfacial Rheology:
https://marquezrn03.github.io/A-Short-Course-On-Interfacial-Rheology/
- A short course on lignin self-assembly and lignin nanoparticles:
https://marquezrn03.github.io/A-Short-courses-on-LNPs/
- European Landscape of Bionanomaterials:
https://marquezrn03.github.io/BioNanomaterials-at-EU/
- US and Canada Landscape of Bionanomaterials:
https://marquezrn03.github.io/BioNanomaterials-US-Canada/